It begins with Susan Baldridge, Middlebury’s vice president for strategy and planning, giving a presentation about the interesting things one could do in an online course. Susan is recruiting faculty to teach. I’m an emeritus professor, enjoying retirement and with time on my hands and curiosity to burn. I like being the first to do something new. And how hard can it be?I’ll just add a few additional sessions and some extra PowerPoint slides to my Alumni College course on World War II. Next the documentary instruction company In the Telling (ITT) gives a presentation. Nice. They can jazz it up and handle the technology for me. A deadline of late August? Okay, so I miss a few golf dates.

Stage 2: Reality Bites

Technological benefits come with costs. I’m told that people have, at maximum, nine-minute attention spans when it comes to watching talking heads on computer screens, which means adding more images, videos, and music to the slides. All right, I can do that. All the visual items have to be broadcast quality. Uh-oh. I also need to add about 150 or so “transmedia links” to information “off canvas” to supplement the lecture materials. What? And we need copyright clearances for each of the roughly 300 items. Soon I am spending all my waking hours searching for new materials and their copyright holders. The files are to be shared with ITT through Dropbox. What the hell is Dropbox? I’m now conducting a full-time research project. My wife, who only recently joined me in retirement, is beginning to feel lonely. Meanwhile, the August deadline looms.

Stage 3: They’re Ready for My Close-Up

I anticipate the filming taking two weeks. With one session a day, I can catch my breath after each class and prepare for the next. In fact, the filming is squeezed into five days, with two sessions a day being the norm. There are more new challenges, such as makeup. That’s a first. The biggest challenge is attempting to communicate with an inanimate object—the camera—after decades of relying on cues from students’ reactions. It never laughs. It never groans. It just stares. But I find my stride after a couple of sessions, and the ITT crew gives me positive reinforcement. I do love compliments, sincere or not.

Stage 4: Editing and Cringing

If I thought I was uncomfortable during the filming, I’m even more so watching myself on film during the editing phase.My first reaction is relief. Hey, I don’t look all that old. Good, no verbal crutches or uptalk. Nice ITT enhancements. But with the benefit of hindsight via not-quite-instant replay, I find myself wanting to phrase things differently, to spend more time on a particular line of thought. Too late. The producers assure me this is both a natural reaction and unnecessary worrying. They think the material is great.

Stage 5: The Premiere

Still to come, and I’d rather not think too much about it. You be the judge.

One year ago, in November 2013, following Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych’s sudden reversal on a pro-European treaty, thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets to protest his decision and, more generally, to demand greater democratic reforms for their country.

During the first few weeks of demonstrations—organized in great part by young people—inhabitants of Kiev brought sandwiches and other provisions to protesters. For four months, they braved extreme winter weather and, though they were unable to foresee the tragic challenges that lay ahead, they remained true to their vision of a renewed, democratic Ukraine.

In August, China’s Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress announced electoral reforms for Hong Kong. Fearing the proposed changes might ultimately result in an imposed, preselected leader, students began to demonstrate in the city’s center.

In both these cases, not just students but people of all ages courageously put aside the demands of their daily lives to fight for something that, no matter how cynically it’s sometimes portrayed, remains remarkable in the human spirit: the desire to live without fear.

When we reflect on such courageous acts, sometimes it’s difficult to discern what comprises their extraordinary nature. Are we moved by stories of endurance, of people withstanding subzero temperatures? Or do we respond to the ability to persevere despite uncertainty?Or the drive to “speak truth to power”?The great Silver Age Russian poet Anna Akhmatova reflected on this matter for many years and suggested there were several elements that make up the complex faces of courage, daring, and fortitude.

In this edition of Middlebury Magazine, we find a wealth of these different elements, whether it be World War II veteran Frederick Kelly’s story of flying behind enemy lines to drop supplies to the French Resistance, or journalist Zaheena Rasheed’s return to the Maldives immediately following its 2012 political crisis, along with her resolve to uncover the circumstances surrounding a fellow reporter’s disappearance—this despite threats on her life.

Sometimes, though, courage can be less public and more intimate—but no less moving. Consider Daphne Perry’s unflinching battle with breast cancer, or Hannah Quinn’s hope to create a community that can address depression’s challenges. We also find here miraculous stories, including Chime Dolma’s account of leaving Tibet as a young girl. The Chinese authorities had accused her father of dissent, and she had to be transported out of the country in a box.

Based on her experience of dictatorship, Akhmatova came to believe that fortitude is one of courage’s most critical components. Many people can be daring, but to have fortitude requires an inner form of strength that sets it apart from daily life. The stories recounted here are all testimonies to this fortitude, and to the human capacity to endow with meaning those old but potent words that, despite their threadbare use, still move mountains: freedom and truth.

Around 300 or so years after the word courage first gained foothold in the lexicon (it was spelled corage in Middle English and curage in Old French), Milton wrote, in Paradise Lost, the words “courage never to submit or yield,” essentially establishing a definition that we are all familiar with: “that quality of mind which shows itself in facing danger without fear or shrinking; bravery, boldness, valour.”*

In our cover essay, the decorated international correspondent Ellen Hinsey beautifully writes about where courage comes from, explaining what makes a person courageous while asking all of us: what would you do if faced with similar circumstances?

On the following pages is a collection of essays, oral histories, and narratives—eight Middlebury voices, each serving as an example of unshrinking bravery, boldness, or valor in the face of danger or fear. For some, their stories relate courageous moments, stands, or a way of life. For others, courage is found in the very act of writing these essays, of expressing these feelings.

Within the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary, the first definition of courage, from around 1300, describes “the heart as the seat of feeling, thought, etc.” Chaucer wrote of courage this way. Later, Shakespeare did, too. As far as these eight Middlebury essays are concerned, courage defined this way works just as well.

In a dance studio in White River Junction, Vermont, 10 women lace up thin-soled sandals and tie brightly colored sashes around their waists, the silver coins embroidered on their skirts shimmering and chiming as they move. In purple leggings and a matching sash, Gina Capossela ’87 calls “one-two-three, one-two-three.” The women step in a circle about the studio, finger cymbals sounding and sashes swaying, their wrists flicking in fluid motions. Capossela, who is wiry and strong, with a nimbus of dark, curly hair pulled back from her face, shimmies her hips and turns lightly on the ball of her foot.

Meet the Pied Piper of Middle Eastern dance in a corner of the world seemingly as far from the Middle East as one can get: the Upper Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire. An itinerant dance teacher, Capossela holds classes in town halls and elementary school cafeterias and community centers. And where she goes, students follow.

“She’s a dynamo,” says Julie Grant, a longtime student. “She inspires all of us. She’s more than just a dance teacher.”

Capossela grew up in Vermont in the ’70s and ’80s, graduated from Woodstock High School, and then went to Middlebury, where she studied art history and Italian. It wasn’t until after she graduated that she began studying dance seriously. At first, it was purely a hobby, one secondary to her career in social work and human services.

But in the early 2000s, after holding jobs ranging from volunteer gigs on crisis hotlines to executive directorships, Capossela assessed her career. “I had done everything,” she says. Her realization? “I was bored to tears by it.”

So in 2003 she quit her job and moved to Washington, D.C., to earn her master’s degree in dance from American University. During that time, she performed with the Silk Road Dance Company, dancing at the Egyptian and Uzbek embassies, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and before the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. She went on to travel to Egypt, Morocco, and Turkey to study under other teachers.

Right from the outset in 2005, when Capossela began offering lessons, the would-be belly dancers of the Upper Valley were enthusiastic. “It wasn’t just me,” Capossela says. Middle Eastern dance was catching on across the nation. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and the ensuing national fascination with the Middle East—may have played some part in the belly-dance craze, Capossela thinks.

Certainly Nicole Conte, whose husband had deployed to Iraq with the Vermont National Guard, was curious about anything having to do with the Middle East. She showed up at one of Capossela’s showcases in 2005. “I’ve never missed a term since,” Conte says.

Today, Capossela makes her living teaching full time: her classes range from American-style belly dance to classical, Bhangra, and Bollywood-style Indian dancing.In the Bhangra class, dancers ditch their hip scarves for workout gear and sneakers since the Punjabi folk dance brims with bouncing, spinning, high-energy moves.

Capossela suspects it’s how these forms of dance make women feel—more than the dance’s geographical origins—that keeps them coming back.

“This is an art form where adult women, who are shaped as average adult women are, can flourish and sparkle and radiate,” she says. Belly dancing as practiced in the West isn’t “a form of dance where you have to be under 25 and weigh 100 pounds. This is the dance of real women and real shapes and real lives and real stories.”

Along those lines, she believes she’s teaching more than footwork and choreography. “I’m helping women to connect with the divinity that they already have,” says Capossela. “That’s my real mission and calling.”

If you walk into the Overbrook Gallery in Middlebury’s Museum of Art this winter, you’ll come face to face with Chairman Mao Zedong—his face slathered in green, his lips a vibrant pink (matching the color of his blouse). This puckish, playful visage: it’s not the image generally associated with the Communist leader.

Of Andy Warhol’s iconic images, Mao is one of the most widely reproduced—and this silkscreen print is now part of the Museum’s collection, one of ten Warhol prints the Warhol Foundation recently gifted to the College. Among the figures joining Mao in the gallery are Sitting Bull (Sitting Bull, 1986), a depiction of the Native American originally intended for Warhol’s Cowboys and Indians portfolio; Queen Ntombi of Swaziland, one of four ruling monarchs from 1985 depicted in the artist’s Reigning Queens portfolio, Warhol’s largest; and an adorable pig (Fiesta Pig, 1979), a work commissioned by the German newspaper Die Welt.

The Warhol Foundation’s recent gift doubles the number of Warhol prints in the Museum’s collection, which not only makes for popular exhibits but also for valuable teaching tools. Even the casual observer gleans insights into the artist and his inspirations—Fiesta Pig, for instance, while commissioned, is considered deeply personal, as the animal is said to be Warhol’s pet, a gift from “Baby Jane” Holzer.

The Warhol prints will be on view in the Overbrook Gallery until mid-April. If you’re in the area, it’s a show not to be missed.

As Ron Liebowitz enters the twilight of his presidency, we asked him to reflect on the new challenges that leaders in higher education can expect to face, while examining where these challenges came from and how they can be confronted.

What challenges will future leaders of colleges and universities face that presidents of the last decade either didn’t face or faced only in
limited ways?

At the risk of annoying a whole lot of people, I will start with the issues of cost and relevance. I tried out this issue as a topic of conversation with my faculty colleagues almost three years ago, and let’s just say it was not the most popular topic I ever introduced for collegial dialogue. And I can understand why. Yet it is something that the private institutions, especially, cannot afford to ignore, as the cost of such an education is now around $250,000 for the four-year BA degree.

This figure becomes even more astounding when one learns that the annual cost (room, board, and tuition) of around $60,000 represents only about 70 percent of the actual cost of that education per student. Annual gifts and earnings from the endowment provide what amounts to a hidden “scholarship” of more than $20,000 to even those who pay the full price.

This leads to the question of relevance, whether a degree today ensures what it did for earlier generations…

Right. Our current students are entering a world vastly different than the one their parents and grandparents encountered when they graduated from college. And people want to know: is a liberal arts degree worth worth the investment.And this holds true for everyone, even those most able to afford this high cost.

As taboo as it might be to say aloud, when one is paying a quarter of a million dollars for an education, one of the things one inevitably considers is whether such an investment is relevant to one’s son’s or daughter’s future—whether the four years will help them acquire the knowledge, character, habits of the mind, and skills necessary to compete in a world that is very different from just a generation ago. More and more parents are beginning to notice that the education that worked for them 25 or 30 years ago will not suffice for this generation.

Of course inside the academy and at Middlebury we all know the value of a liberal arts education: it is, in the long term, second to none in preparing young adults for a fulfilling and productive life. Yet, the many defenses of a liberal arts education that are offered up more and more frequently, while convincing to those already committed, are not fully understood by the uninitiated. Unfortunately, this group represents an overwhelming majority of families with soon-to-be college-bound children.

What, then, is the solution, or a solution, to this information or curricular gap?

Well, we need to continue to extol the virtues of having generations of liberally educated graduates while, at the same time, building on what a liberal arts education has traditionally offered students. That is, the 21st-century version of the liberal arts, different from the 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century versions, should evolve as its predecessors have done and include components that require students to experiment, conceive, design, build, and engage in uncertainty. It needs to provide the opportunity for students to take all they learn from studying across multiple disciplines and through different modes of inquiry and apply their learning to real-world challenges, questions, and numerous unknowns. Students need the opportunity to take risks, experience failure, and learn lessons from such failure without fear of a bad grade or having to wait until their first job or endeavor after graduation.

The combination of intense specialization and technological innovation, spread so easily and rapidly over the past decade as the result of globalization, requires the liberal arts to evolve and become more dynamic. It needn’t become diluted or beholden solely to the trendy or the here and now. Rather, it needs to equip its students not only with the timeless virtues of the liberal arts of the past but also with the tools, perspectives, and experience necessary to adapt to our rapidly changing and competitive world.

The two Department of Energy Solar Decathlon competitions, the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) summer program, the Center for Social Entrepreneurship, MiddCORE, Middlebury FoodWorks, our faculty-student summer research program, and the annual Spring Student Symposium are all examples of programs that can define, complement, and transform a traditional liberal arts education. These programs provide opportunities for students to follow up their course work with experimentation, design work, problem solving, collaboration, and the experience of creating something new, or at least the setting out to do so. Failure is a common and inevitable part of each program. What one learns in the process is invaluable: students graduate possessing a combined breadth of knowledge and set of skills that are today so necessary to succeed in a highly competitive and increasingly specialized world.

And so why is this so different now from what presidents faced 10, 20, and 30 years ago?

As I mentioned previously, the world has changed dramatically since many of the faculty and the parents of our current students were themselves in college, and the rapid pace of change challenges our education systems, from kindergarten through higher education. It has become harder and harder to keep up and evolve with the times and what they demand from our graduates. It remains to be seen if colleges and universities, let alone K–12 schools, can blend the best of what I would call traditional pedagogies with what might be called new pedagogies that recognize the ways current and future generations of students will learn. We already see a large proportion of students shying away from text-based materials and gravitating almost naturally to digitized content. The attention span of the current generation of students is far shorter than it was 20 years ago, which translates for many into an inability to sit for 50 minutes and enjoy, let alone learn from, a lecture without texting or checking Facebook. Yet this should come as no surprise. At the same time, an expectation that faculty can and will adjust to these changes and do so seamlessly, while pursuing their research and professional obligations, is optimistic, at least in many of our disciplines.

Robust and generous faculty-development programs are essential if higher education as we know it is to thrive in this century. And a willingness on the part of faculty to engage in such professional development is equally—and perhaps more—essential.

While our faculty are incredibly committed to and excel at the human-intensive pedagogy that sits at the core of a residential liberal arts college education, the incentive for faculty to build upon that pedagogy and amend the curriculum accordingly to meet the needs of students is not quite apparent, or at least not obviously so. And therein lies the challenge for current and future presidents of colleges and universities: to articulate creatively a vision for the liberal arts and higher education that is both timeless and time sensitive, and that recognizes how what was valuable in the past can serve as the foundation for the future. It must be a vision that motivates and inspires faculty, and one whose new pedagogies must be based on a deep understanding of one’s students, align with how those students learn, and allow for the kind of dynamism in both the pedagogy and curriculum essential for the 21st century.

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http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2015/02/06/old-chapel-looking-ahead/feed/0Antoinette Rangel Is Having the Time of Her Lifehttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2015/02/05/antoinette-rangel-is-having-the-time-of-her-life/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2015/02/05/antoinette-rangel-is-having-the-time-of-her-life/#commentsThu, 05 Feb 2015 16:15:50 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14178

She knows it sounds excessively earnest, but Antoinette Rangel ’09 often tells her colleagues, “It’s been a pleasure to serve the American people with you today!” before leaving the White House each evening. (And it does sound so like Aaron Sorkin that one can almost hear patriotic music swelling in the background as she walks and talks. But after talking to Rangel and her friends and colleagues it becomes clear that the enthusiasm is utterly genuine.)

As deputy director of Hispanic Media for the Obama administration, Rangel has served as a major point of contact during a year in which Hispanic media outlets have been especially keen to hear the president’s position on certain issues. The days before President Obama announced his executive action on immigration—which aims to protect more than four million undocumented immigrants—were the “kind of days you’re so busy you can hardly see straight; you forget to eat lunch; you’re moving a million miles an hour, fervently ticking items off a never-ending to-do list.” Rangel insists, however, she was smiling the entire time.

While tweeting from the White House’s bilingual Twitter account during the president’s speech on the executive action, she couldn’t help but think of all the work preceding that moment. In particular, one of the president’s lines stood out to her: “We were strangers once, too.”

“It was very powerful,” she writes in an email, “for the president to remind us all of what binds us together as a nation: a tradition of welcoming immigrants is the very fabric of who we are.”

Since creating jobs like Rangel’s, the administration says it’s seen broader coverage from Hispanic outlets, which not only report on the White House’s work on immigration, but also on health care, student loans, the minimum wage, and other topics. During previous administrations, Hispanic media was addressed under the larger banner of specialized media.(Though this would’ve been a difficult tradition to keep, since Hispanic media outlets are proliferating, with more than 20 having been formed since 2000.)

Rangel says that within the White House, people have viewed the Hispanic media coverage of the executive actions as largely positive, although she acknowledges that this year immigration advocates have become impatient for the federal government to act. “It’s tough to be patient,” Rangel writes. “I know, as a Latina myself, how it impacts millions of lives daily.” Later she adds, “In my family, I’ve seen the impact of lack of education, opportunity, and access to health care—for me it isn’t just statistics on a page but people in my life whom I love.”

When Rangel first got her job in the Obama administration, one of her cousins asked something to the effect of “Oh, are you going to be the help?And take care of the girls?”

That fueled her, she writes, saying it “reminds me how important being part of this administration is; because I think about my family and all the other young Latinas who might not think it’s possible to work in a place like the White House. And to them I say what the president says so often: dream big dreams.”

**

Rangel’s days rarely end when she leaves her White House desk. Most evenings after work she heads straight to class at Georgetown Law School, where she also serves as a transfer peer mentor. Rangel had been a law student at Northeastern, in Boston, when she took the job in the Obama administration’s communications office in 2011; now she’s catching up in night classes. For a while, she sang in a gospel choir and she volunteers at a women’s homeless shelter in Northwest D.C. In what free time she had, she’d been training for the Marine Corps Marathon, which she completed in November while wearing a liberal amount of American flag apparel.

But Rangel revels in the frenetic pace of her days. In fact, when Univision profiled her as one of the 15 most influential Latinos or Latinas in the executive branch, she told them the one thing she’d change is the number of hours she has to work—that is, she’d like to be in the White House more. Apparently, the long days and the vow to be attached to her Blackberry aren’t enough. “Even on the most tiring days,” she says, “the place still takes my breath away.”

**

When Rangel was a kid, she had a very typical list of dream jobs. She was intrigued by the elephant trainers she saw every year at the circus near her home in the Bronx. She considered becoming an actress or a singer. Once she got older, however, her ambitions grew.

She attended LaGuardia High School, best known as the setting for the 1980 film Fame, hoping both for a good education and time to sing. Her English teacher Ed McCarthy says she didn’t voice any specific ambitions, but that she was “driven to do good.” Before graduating, she considered becoming a lawyer or running for political office, testing out the latter by serving as co-president of student government and vice president of her senior class. Then, in 2005, she went to Middlebury as a Posse Scholar. At Middlebury, Posse students arrive early their first year, and Rangel was the first person to introduce herself to everyone. And she just kept going from there.

Rangel served all four years on the Community Council; she was a member of the social house KDR.She played rugby, sang jazz, attended weekly Posse meetings, and led a spring-break service trip to the Dominican Republic. She volunteered at a nursing home nearby, as well as with the Migrant Farmworkers Coalition. She was president of the College Democrats. She also worked on several political campaigns—the summer after she completed high school, she campaigned for Gifford Miller when he ran against Mayor Michael Bloomberg in NYC. As well, she did a summer stint for Hillary Clinton before the 2008 presidential primaries, telling the Middlebury Campus that fall, “I believe that Hillary has the experience to lead starting on day one.”

Ross Commons Dean Ann Hanson served with Rangel on Middlebury’s Community Council and recalls a time when Rangel was nearly speechless after running into Chief Justice John Roberts, who was on campus to give a lecture. Earlier, Rangel had sat at his table for lunch and later that day he said hello while passing her on the sidewalk.

Murray Dry, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science, recollects that Rangel wanted to be a U.S. senator. He was skeptical about how feasible this career path was, but admired Rangel’s work ethic enough to entertain the idea. “She wasn’t the type of student who only takes courses she would easily succeed in,” Dry says. “She was not the top student, but worked incredibly hard. I admired that. Sticking with something, it’s not something you see in every student.”

Dry believes Rangel would make an excellent representative—a job she’s considered. In fact, she told at least one White House reporter that she hopes to one day join New York’s congressional delegation. And she’s spoken of similar ambitions to those close to her.

Julia Stevens, a childhood friend, remembers when they were in ninth grade Rangel saying she was going to be governor of New York someday. “I was in awe of her,” Stevens says. “I don’t know how she does it. I don’t think I’ll ever know.”

And Sheyenne Brown ’09, who was in Rangel’s Posse class, predicts that after Rangel graduates law school and is a “badass civil rights attorney” for awhile, she’ll “be the first woman or Hispanic president.” Brown continues, “I’d say she had been very clear about her political aspirations from the very beginning. If not explicitly, then in her demeanor.”

Rangel impresses those around her with her drive, her ambition, and her ability to accomplish a lot. Which means that her busy D.C. life must feel comforting: it’s the way she’s always led her life. If anything, her chief strategy seems to be amassing experiences until all obstacles are scared away in the face of brute busyness.

After ending her collegiate career as vice president of the Student Government Association, Rangel went to Northeastern. After her first year of law school, she landed an internship in the White House Office of Political Affairs. There she ran into an old friend, Josh Earnest, a deputy press secretary in the White House. (The two had worked together on a gubernatorial campaign in Florida in 2006.) That fall, they often had coffee together, and as Rangel was preparing to return to Boston to begin her second year of law school, Earnest suggested she apply for a full-time job as press wrangler. She said she couldn’t, that the timing was bad. But after spending the night thinking it over, she changed her mind.

“When I returned to planet Earth,” she says, “and realized I’d just been offered the opportunity to interview for a dream job, I emailed Josh at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning and said I was 150 percent in and that I’d do whatever it took to get the position.”

**

Official White House Photograph by Pete Souza

Most of her personal peanut gallery, the ones who have been placing odds on how far she’ll go, have been on White House tours. Rangel estimates she’s given hundreds—tours for her mom’s best friend’s third-grade class, for friends from home, for Middlebury professors. They comment on how balanced and healthy she looks, but don’t quite understand how that’s possible, given how much she’s doing.

“People call me turbo, or very type-A,” Rangel says. “It is very hard for me to sit still.” She adds, “I thrive off being busy and am definitely a workaholic.” It’s these qualities that make her an effective advocate for the causes that are important to her, says Josh Earnest, now the White House press secretary. “Her success stems from her tenacity and determination to fight for what she believes in.”

Perhaps, say some, Rangel’s ability to stay balanced comes from perspective, perspective that allows her to be serious about her work while never taking herself so seriously (a quality rarely seen in Washington).

When Sheyenne Brown met Rangel that first week at Middlebury, she remembers that the LaGuardia High graduate had been on a “mismatching kick where she wore these crazy clothes. I just knew it was because she was trying to be different.” Different from Middlebury, maybe, but perfectly in synch with who Rangel was—a new place wasn’t going to change that.(Her freshman year, Rangel and her father made a cardboard Ben & Jerry’s pint for her Halloween costume—extending a family tradition of designing and constructing outlandish costumes—and several people at Middlebury remember it even today.)

It’s momentarily stunning to hear Brown describe Rangel as “one of the most obnoxious people I’d ever met,” though, to be honest, Brown’s sentiment is both understandable and endearing, especially when you hear her talk about it. (At the beginning of their freshman year, the two had driven to Vermont together, with Rangel playing “Chariot” by Gavin DeGraw on the car stereo repeatedly. “Sheyenne will never forgive me for playing that song,” she says.)

“I guess Ant kind of grew on me like a fungus, and I honestly say that with such love and gratefulness,” Brown says. “She pretty much forced her way into my heart, and I can’t even pinpoint when I started to adore her the way I do now.”

**

One White House tour in particular stands out for Rangel. When her sister Elia first saw the Oval Office, “the gravity of it hit her, and her face lit up with excitement and turned bright red.”

“It’s very exciting to share this place with others,” Rangel says. “Every day it feels surreal, like at some point someone will wake me from this incredible dream.”

Out of anyone else’s mouth, such sentiment would sound excessively earnest. But for Rangel, it just sounds . . . right.

Jaime Fuller ’11 writes for New York magazine. She previously covered politics at the Washington Post. As an editor with the Middlebury Campus, she covered the “Rangel Administration” of the College’s Student Government Association.

Stouffer: Now that the pregame work is done, we can finally catch up. I’ve had this [Major League Soccer] game circled on the calendar—two Midd alums in the same press box, in the same role as directors of communications—since I joined D.C. United.

3′ NICK LABROCCA (RAPIDS) FOULS AND RECEIVES A YELLOW CARD.

Lindholm: Yellow…that’s not a good start. So, Craig, we’ve known each other since I got into MLS seven years ago, and you noticed I was a Middlebury grad. How did you come to the game?

Stouffer: I didn’t play soccer in college, but it was a rare home game or NESCAC postseason visit to Williams when I wasn’t on the sideline. MLS was in its first year when I began my senior year, a time when I wasn’t sure about my own path—so I decided to carve out an unlikely career writing about the game. As you know, I covered soccer for a while before landing this gig this year.

12′ GOAL! UNITED 1, RAPIDS 0. LUIS SILVA GOAL, TAYLOR KEMP ASSIST.

Lindholm: Nice! They’re supposed to be sending me out on a high note! (This is Lindholm’s last game with the Rapids. He has accepted the position of assistant coach for the University of Massachusetts’s men’s program.)

Stouffer: Silva is the future of the game in the U.S., I believe. He’s of Mexican heritage, raised in the U.S., and starred in college at UC Santa Barbara.

Stouffer: How about you? What made you stay in the game after playing at Midd?

Lindholm: Coach Saward doesn’t just teach you how to play soccer, he also instills in you a great love for the sport. I had followed MLS since the day it started, so after graduation I wanted to join the league and help its growth.

45’+4 FIRST HALF ENDS: UNITED 1, RAPIDS 0.

Lindholm: It seems like you’re getting into MLS just as it’s ready to hit the big time. Did that play a role in joining D.C.?

Stouffer: Absolutely. As a reporter, I spent a decade investing myself in the sport—now I get to do the same on behalf of Major League Soccer. It’s an amazing opportunity.

46′ SECOND HALF BEGINS.

Stouffer: So with that being said, why are you leaving MLS now?

Lindholm: In 10 years, there will be more teams, and more jobs in coaching, scouting, analysis, and business. At UMass, I’ll study the game and also get a graduate degree. There might be a new role for me in MLS down the line.

52′ GOAL! UNITED 1, RAPIDS 1. DILLON SERNA GOAL, JARED WATTS ASSIST.

Lindholm: What a strike, from 40 yards! That will be on Sports Center in the morning!

Stouffer: Think you’ll miss MLS, where you see skill like that every week?

Lindholm: Definitely. But I’m joining a crowd of Midd grads in college coaching and helping foster passion for the sport in younger players. That’s exciting, too.

57′ FABIAN ESPINDOLA (UNITED) HITS THE POST.

Stouffer: Just missed! That might’ve taken Goal of the Week away from Serna had it gone in.

Lindholm: We’re living dangerously here.

67′ GOAL! UNITED 2, RAPIDS 1. LUIS SILVA GOAL, SEAN FRANKLIN ASSIST.

Stouffer: There it is!

81′ GOAL! UNITED 3, RAPIDS 1. CHRIS ROLFE GOAL, TAYLOR KEMP ASSIST.

Lindholm: You know, this feels like my senior spring at Midd: trying to savor all the moments—even the negative ones, like a D.C. goal—because I know things are about to change.

“Arthur Healy & His Students,” the title of the exhibit at the Henry Sheldon Museum in downtown Middlebury, is an apt one—not only because it’s a literal description of the artists who have contributed work for the display, but also because this exhibit is intensely personal.

Arthur K.D. Healy was a beloved member of the Middlebury community for more than 40 years. He was a Princeton graduate, though he had attended Middlebury as a freshman in 1921 and would come to make Vermont his home in the early 1930s. In 1943, he became the College’s first artist in residence, an appointment that preceded postings on the teaching faculty and as chair of the fine arts department.

As the Sheldon exhibit attests, Healy mentored an impressive array of students who would make their mark in the arts world; their paintings share wall space with Healy’s watercolors in the museum’s second-floor galleries. It’s a beautiful display, yet it is the collective reflections of the alumni, presented with their work, which make the biggest impression.

“He made the career of an artist seem so seductive and so admirable that it never occurred to me that I should not try to be one,” wrote Sabra Field ’57.

“Your job is not to render everything in its entirety, but to suggest it,” Ken Delmar ’63 remembers Healy telling him. “Try to capture your subject with the least amount of drawing, least amount of brushwork, least amount of color, least amount of work.”

Nancy Taylor Stonington ’66 recalls the three colors—alizarin crimson, cadmium yellow deep, and Payne’s gray—that Healy insisted they use and relates that 50 years later she relies on these palette choices in her own teaching.

Much of Healy’s work was lost in a studio fire, so the paintings on display are largely loaned from family and friends, many of whom have their own stories of Arthur Healy, stories of his generosity, his fierce intellect, his presence. This bit of detail—the provenance of the artwork—is perfect, really. It’s in keeping with the very nature of the exhibit itself.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/11/06/exhibit-resident-artist/feed/0Online Learning: Next Coursehttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/11/06/online-learning-next-course/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/11/06/online-learning-next-course/#commentsThu, 06 Nov 2014 16:27:11 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14155A digital course for alumni—Years of Upheaval: Diplomacy, War, and Social Change, 1919–1945—is slated for a winter release and will be taught by Russ Leng ’60, the James Jermain Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Law. The course will consist of 10 video classes, each featuring a short lecture and augmented by documentary images, recordings, and videos. To conclude each class, Leng will converse with Frank Sesno ’77, the award-winning journalist and director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University.

The alumni course follows two other digital ventures recently launched by Middlebury entities. Last summer, the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute auditioned its first online course, a six-session series titled Global Trade and Weapons of Mass Destruction. And this fall, students in Middlebury’s master’s degree program in Hebrew are taking advantage of the opportunity to supplement their traditional instruction with video-conferenced class meetings.

Susan Baldridge, vice president for strategy and planning, sees these projects as invaluable opportunities to explore how best to construct learning experiences—“experiences that reflect the institution’s commitment to educational excellence”—which will allow instructors to connect with students and the broader community in new ways.

With the production of Years of Upheaval nearing completion, Leng says that he found the subject matter particularly suited for “an online multi-disciplinary and multi-media approach.”He adds, “I hope that those who take the course, will find it half as compelling as I did in creating it.”

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/11/06/online-learning-next-course/feed/0Download: Why I Love Socrateshttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/11/06/download-why-i-love-socrates/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/11/06/download-why-i-love-socrates/#commentsThu, 06 Nov 2014 16:19:03 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14151Everything about Socrates is ironic and enigmatic: He is one of history’s most famous teachers, yet he claimed not to be a teacher. He stands at the beginning of more than 2,000 years of texts, yet he wrote nothing himself. Universities have canonized Plato’s Socratic dialogues, yet Socrates was never in an academy, but on the streets of Athens—the city that sentenced him to hemlock.

The Delphic oracle called Socrates the wisest person in Athens, yet Socrates felt he possessed only an ironic wisdom, an enlightened ignorance: “I know that I do not know.”

Of all the versions of Socrates, Plato’s remains the most compelling and influential. Plato’s phrases have entered contemporary English: we speak of “the Socratic method,” “the gadfly to the state,” and “the examined life.” Instead of rigidly defending a single position, Plato’s Socrates shows us how to question all positions rigorously. The Socratic position reminds us—lest we be in a rush to judge others—to recognize how much we do not know. Searching itself is meaningful; questions become as important as answers.

Plato’s Socrates continues to inspire students today, as well as creative minds across cultures. The young Nietzsche called Socrates “the vortex of world history.”

Virginia Woolf, in an essay on the Greek classics, wrote that reading a Socratic dialogue provides “the greatest felicity of which we are capable.” And Martin Luther King, in his 1963 letter from a Birmingham jail, invoked the spirit of Socrates when he called for reform and for “nonviolent gadflies.”

Today, when it comes to humanistic inquiry and hard conversations about controversial issues, Socratic dialogue can provide a valuable model; there’s so much we do not know, and so much we can gain from questioning and searching together.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/11/06/download-why-i-love-socrates/feed/0Symposium: Tech’s Rolehttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/11/06/symposium-techs-role/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/11/06/symposium-techs-role/#commentsThu, 06 Nov 2014 16:15:49 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14148This year, at the annual Clifford Symposium, the keynote address was given by John Palfrey, head of school at Phillips Academy and author of four books on education in the digital age. The conference’s theme was “Transforming the Academy in the Digital Era,” and Palfrey’s address touched on the need to blend digital tools and face-to-face pedagogy.

“When we figure out the sweet spot in the combination,” he said, “we can do some really interesting work together.”

People often think in either/or constructs. But at this symposium, as attendees discussed technology’s role in education, they consciously strove for more of a both/and method of thinking, something that was readily evident in all the lectures, exhibits, panel discussions, and performances. (The symposium concluded with a mind-bending performance by Paul Miller, also known as DJ Spooky, in which the artist channeled electronica to interpret algorithms that mirror the geometry in ice crystals and the math of climate-change data. He then melded this iPad composition with a violin solo to construct a suite of music that most attendees surely never thought possible.)

“What we wanted to avoid was the rhetoric of utopia or dystopia when talking about technology in the academy,” Jason Mittell said a few days after the symposium had concluded. Mittell, a professor of film and media culture and American studies, organized Clifford this year. As regards technology and pedagogy, he said he subscribes neither to “knee-jerk boosterism” nor “dystopian skepticism.”

“In my mind, it was critical that we approached technology within a context, recognizing all the other factors that affect teaching, learning, and scholarship,” he said.

“We’re living in an era of change,” he continued, “and all too often it seems that people are quick either to celebrate or blame technology in ways disproportionate to its impact. We wanted to bring a realist approach to understanding the role of technology in the academy.”

Mittell saw this year’s Clifford as the launch party for Middlebury’s new digital liberal arts initiative (DLA). This effort will involve people from geography, history, and library sciences working to foster a campus-wide understanding of technology and the liberal arts.

Throughout the year, DLA will host workshops and reading groups pertaining to open-access publishing, digital archival research, and emerging interdisciplinary movements such as the digital humanities.

Said Mittell: “We want to give visibility to new tools and approaches in teaching and scholarship while also providing support and guidance for faculty who’re interested in experimenting, trying different things.

“Digital transformations have caused us to rethink what’s a given,” he said. “That doesn’t mean we’re putting technology at the center of what we do. We just don’t want ignorance to be an excuse or fear to be an obstacle when considering how technology can be best used in the academy.”

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/11/06/symposium-techs-role/feed/0Colophon: Where Do Fanatics Come From?http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/11/06/colophon-where-do-fanatics-comes-from/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/11/06/colophon-where-do-fanatics-comes-from/#commentsThu, 06 Nov 2014 16:07:35 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14144Despite being a part of the generation that in World War II defeated fascism, Eric Hoffer was never a member of U.S. armed forces. Rejected as an enlistee when he was 40, the Bronx-born, working-class Hoffer turned to laboring as a longshoreman along the docks of San Francisco’s Embarcadero. Always considering himself more a reader than a writer, Hoffer nevertheless distinguished himself with his first book, garnering acclaim with the 1951 publication of what scholars and laymen alike continue to regard as a classic.

In The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Hoffer focused on explicating the collective psychologies underpinning Nazism and Stalinism, the two dictatorial movements that had risen to prominence, and very nearly to world domination, during the prime of his life. Others, of course, had wrestled with how nearly half of humanity could ever have been led down totalitarianism’s senselessly destructive path. However, no one had yet explored the issue with the incisiveness, lucidity, and wit that Hoffer’s prose offered. Hoffer had an abiding respect for the common people and yet discovered that they continued to allow themselves, with alarming predictability, to be blindly misled.

While generally in favor of religion, Hoffer nonetheless professed lifelong atheism. He was wary of the descent into fanaticism that, now, has become a hallmark of extremist sectarian and terrorist movements. Fanaticism facilitates abandoning one’s fundamental humanity or, as Hoffer wrote: “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.”

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/11/06/colophon-where-do-fanatics-comes-from/feed/0This Is Not Business As Usualhttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/10/30/this-is-not-business-as-usual/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/10/30/this-is-not-business-as-usual/#commentsThu, 30 Oct 2014 14:56:56 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14085

Jamie Gaucher, Director of Business Development, Town of Middlebury

How an innovative partnership between the College and town is boosting the local economy.

Just after breakfast on a warm fall morning, Jamie Gaucher walks down the steps of the Middlebury Inn and around to his Honda minivan. He noses the car out of the parking lot, following an itinerary that’s become very familiar. “I like to start downtown,” he says, pointing out the white façade of the Congregational Church, driving past the town green and down Merchant’s Row, then heading left on Main Street and up toward the College campus.

He’ll take a visitor inside the Davis Family Library before returning to the car. Then he continues out past the athletic facilities and back toward Middlebury’s industrial park on Exchange Street. All the while, he asks polite questions about the guest’s business, what resources it needs to be successful—and offers subtle guidance on why setting up shop in Middlebury would be a great way to help the enterprise grow.

Gaucher may seem an unlikely tour guide: Before 2012, he’d never been to Vermont. But since April of 2013, when he became the town of Middlebury’s first-ever director of business development, he’s been talking up the region at trade fairs and on cold calls—and when he finds a receptive business owner, he invites them for this nickel tour.

Gaucher, a 6-foot-4-inch New York native who came to Middlebury after 14 years as an economic development official in West Virginia, is the most visible evidence of an unusual initiative that’s the culmination of years of work by College officials. The aim: to bring new economic vitality and more jobs to the town of Middlebury in an attempt to reduce tax burdens, assist with faculty recruitment, and create new opportunities for students. “We have a guiding principle that what’s good for the College is good for the town, and vice versa, so to the extent we can help each other, all the better,” says College President Ronald Liebowitz. “Jamie Gaucher’s position is part and parcel of that.”

It’s an effort that goes far beyond the hiring of the man the local press has dubbed “Middlebury’s jobs czar.” It’s an opportunity to leverage burgeoning student interest in entrepreneurship, a passion fueled by academic programs that have grown over the last decade. It’s also aimed at convincing a growing class of telecommuters—who, in theory, can live anywhere—to consider relocating to Middlebury. Although the various initiatives, some of them funded by the College, are not yet a clear-cut success, most observers are encouraged by early results. The effort seems likely to be one piece of what people in Middlebury will recall about Liebowitz’s decade-long presidency when he steps down in 2015. “This is one of Ron’s legacies,” says Jon Isham, an economics professor who’s been a central part of the efforts. “It wouldn’t have happened without him, and the reason it happened is that he brought us all together, then let us all run with it.”

Indeed, the efforts underway today are only part of a broader strategy that emerged a decade ago. Though Middlebury is sometimes referred to as the “Town’s College,” the relationship between the two hasn’t always been so symbiotic. For generations, while many students moved back and forth between the College and the town without a thought, there was little cooperation at an official level. It was almost as if the two existed in different worlds.

Middlebury President Ronald D. Liebowitz

Soon after Liebowitz took office, Bruce Hiland, a former McKinsey consultant and publishing executive who had moved to Addison County in 1987, approached the College’s new president and proposed a meeting with a group of local business leaders. Even today, Liebowitz recalls that he was skeptical given the often-stated “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” reality when it came to greater College engagement in the town. But Hiland was persistent and challenged the group to come up with some “big ideas” for the town. Once they started talking, progress came quickly, though the project first identified was not feasible and came to naught. Within three years, though, the College had pledged $1 million to support the $5 million renovation of Town Hall Theater and then $9 million to help fund construction of an in-town bridge over Otter Creek, an idea that had been a seemingly unachievable dream for 50 years. The bridge opened in 2010.

But even with the investment in infrastructure and amenities, the need to bring more jobs to the area remained. In 2006, the College hired Spencer Cox ’08 as a summer intern to work closely with Dave Donahue ’91, special assistant to the president of the College, and Hiland to study the issue. “Although the town of Middlebury is not in a state of crisis, long-empty storefronts [and] a slowing economy have sparked concerns that Middlebury is falling behind,” Cox wrote in a report that examined how other institutions—including Dartmouth, Marlboro, and Colgate—were partnering with their towns.

Within months of Cox’s report, concern over the lagging local economy spiked. In January of 2007, two of Middlebury’s largest employers, Standard Register and Specialty Filament, announced plans to close their local facilities, resulting in a combined loss of 287 jobs. (The College, with approximately 1,200 full-time employees, remains the largest employer in both the town and in Addison County.) Middlebury has just 6,588 residents and 1,996 households (according to the 2010 Census), so that scale of job loss had a giant impact. The fallout from the plant closings served as a reminder of something Liebowitz had been saying for years: that beneath the “veneer of prosperity” created by its rural beauty and picturesque campus, the town of Middlebury isn’t as affluent as it might appear. According to census data, 17.5 percent of town residents live below the poverty line, and its median household income of $47,849 falls below the state average by more than 10 percent.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/10/30/this-is-not-business-as-usual/feed/5Old Chapel: Arts Scenehttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/10/30/old-chapel-arts-scene/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/10/30/old-chapel-arts-scene/#commentsThu, 30 Oct 2014 14:56:04 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14041The arts have a rich history at Middlebury, playing a fundamental role in the life and culture of the College. We talked to President Liebowitz about the importance of the arts, its evolution inside and outside the curriculum, and its future in higher education.

Let’s start broadly: What is the role of the arts in a liberal arts education?
It’s an integral part of a liberal arts education. To be liberally educated you have to have an understanding, an appreciation, and a critique, in some way, of the arts. The arts are an embodiment of the human endeavor, a product of creativity, and an expression of one’s relationship to oneself, to other people, and to the environment. The arts are central to our educational mission.

Students come to a liberal arts college like Middlebury for both the breadth and the depth of what we offer. If you’re a chemistry major or a political science major, you’ll take 18 to 20 courses outside your chosen field of study. You’ll be exposed to various ways of thinking, creating, and appreciating. This broad education includes the arts.

The College recently received a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation to support a multiyear project to bring emerging artists in dance to collaborate with Middlebury faculty and students in other disciplines. This seems to be a groundbreaking effort.
I’m very excited about this. “Movement Matters” will address the question of how human bodies can shape—both literally and metaphorically—our political and physical worlds. Christal Brown, an assistant professor and chair of the dance program, will direct the project, and she’s done an amazing job. She’s an incredible ambassador and spokesperson for the performing arts becoming more central in the lives of our students, faculty, and staff.

To be honest, I think students are already there. With this project, I think faculty and staff will be the ones being pushed to think beyond the traditional boundaries of a liberal arts education. As faculty advisers, we always encourage students to broaden their experiences by taking courses outside their areas of endeavor. But this project goes further. It will compel faculty to think about how art meshes with their disciplinary teaching. It’s a wonderful reinforcement of the liberal arts ideal.

During your time at Middlebury, have you seen an increase in student interest in the arts?
I believe there’s greater student demand to engage in artistic endeavors. There’s always been great interest in the arts curriculum here, and this student body has consistently been a bit more arts oriented than other student bodies I’ve encountered in the academy.

I’m seeing an expansion of interest outside the curriculum. We have amazingly creative students working on, say, playwriting in the Old Stone Mill or pottery on Adirondack View. Both spaces fall under the auspices of PCI, our Programs on Creativity and Innovation in the Liberal Arts, and they’re serving as creative laboratories for students who want to experiment outside the classroom.

Now, there’s healthy debate among some faculty as to whether we should be facilitating this experimentation outside of the curriculum. Some arts faculty feel students should understand the fundamentals of what they’re doing, rather than just attempting it. I understand their thinking, but another perspective is unquestionably compelling. Peter Hamlin, the Christian A. Johnson Professor of Music, says that among his composition students, those who have composed music experimentally in the Old Stone Mill have arrived in his class having already learned, to an appreciable, if not complete, extent what works and what doesn’t work, and he senses a constructive confidence as they discuss their creative endeavors.

Like in other disciplines, in the arts, there’s theory and there’s practice. How valuable are the opportunities students have to engage in these “real world” programs like the Potomac Theatre Project in New York or the Town Hall Theater in town?
Extremely valuable. Let’s look at the Potomac Theatre Project (PTP). Since Cheryl Faraone and Richard Romagnoli founded PTP (with Jim Petosa) in the mid 1980s, scores of Middlebury students have been involved with this professional acting company, working alongside equity actors, learning the art of acting as well as set and costume design, in ways really hard to replicate in the traditional classroom or theater program. And since PTP moved to New York and off-Broadway seven years ago, the experience has gotten that much richer. Our undergraduate theatre program already is amazing; access to PTP makes it, in my view, remarkable.

As well, our partnership with the Town Hall Theatre not only supports a local cultural institution but also expands our students’ opportunities. (For more on this partnership, see p. 32) During the school year, students act, co-direct, and stage productions in collaboration with community actors and performers. Each January, THT also houses our winter-term musical, which typically plays to full houses every night. And in the summer, our Language Schools students perform in the space, as the arts constitute an important part of the learning process and Language School mission. We have flexibility in our accessible venues, and we also place unique artistic offerings right in town.

There are two other programs emblematic of both the thirst for, and success of, the arts for our students. During fall break, senior majors in architecture studies will visit cities—recent locations have been Montreal and Boston—where they will view and study important architectural works. They’ll meet with the architects of those projects, when possible, and also visit architectural firms, both large and small, to see first-hand what it means to work in this field; this kind of exposure to the profession is difficult to obtain in the Champlain Valley.

Another extraordinary opportunity is the Museum Assistance Program (MAP). Students learn how to be docents of a collection—they learn how to show, talk about, and teach art. But they are also learning to speak intelligently to audiences and to carry themselves in professional ways. They’re acquiring interpersonal and intellectual skills that will help them in any profession.

There’s also a fund that allows winter term students to…
They purchase art for the museum! Yes, that’s another wonderful opportunity. Through the generous gift of an alumna, the students research art, they learn about art acquisition, and they learn about the marketplace. It’s an incredible experience, and they get to work alongside the donor to the fund, an art gallery owner, who comes to campus and provides advice and expertise. Another fund, given by parents of a recent graduate, provides residences for visiting musicians. When these professional musicians come to campus, they spend a little time on campus and work with students, giving the students a feel for performing or composing at a professional level. These experiences are invaluable.

The College recently received a generous gift of a Steinway concert grand piano, and part of the donor agreement was that this piano be made available to the entire community.
It’s a beautiful gift to the College, and this aspect of the gift especially so. We have far more musical talent than what we regularly hear about. When the piano arrived, this became abundantly clear. You wrote about it in the magazine—we had sign-up opportunities for people to come into the concert hall and play. The list filled up immediately. And interest has continued, as it has with people getting to play other pianos. If anything, we’re many pianos short in terms of demand on campus! A gift of 10, 20, and maybe 30 pianos for practice and leisurely playing would probably still not meet our campus demand; one can hope!

Middlebury has celebrated music for a long time. We have a concert series in its 95th year, and recently I looked at the entire lineup of performers who have come to campus during this period. Both the evolution and the continuity in this music series is remarkable. Middlebury cares about music, and this Steinway is symbolic of that commitment to the art form. It has all the more meaning by coming to us as a gift from parents whose son excelled here in music and the performing arts.

There are well-documented economic pressures on higher education. Where do the arts fall in these discussions of cost and relevance?
It’s a real question, specifically one of cost. To circle back to the beginning of our conversation: the arts are essential to a liberal arts education. Appreciating the arts doesn’t end when one graduates. Rather, if we are successful in educating our students in the liberal arts tradition, that appreciation becomes a lifelong endeavor. Learning about artistic forms allows one to appreciate life. We’d be delinquent if we didn’t recognize the arts’ place in our students’ educations.

Does this mean always having the most expensive things? No. It means always making artistic endeavors a part of students’ educational experiences. Students must be exposed to, and inspired by, the arts—by what they see and hear and learn. Middlebury has long been committed to this philosophy, and I believe we’ll not only retain this commitment but strengthen it in the years ahead.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/10/30/old-chapel-arts-scene/feed/0Pursuits: On the Roadhttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/10/30/pursuits-on-the-road/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/10/30/pursuits-on-the-road/#commentsThu, 30 Oct 2014 14:55:41 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14049Physician Bob Friedman ’68 was visiting a large house on Cape Cod, checking in on a wealthy patient who had high blood pressure. “Are you exercising regularly?” he asked. Of course, the patient said—even though laundry festooned the treadmill in his living room. “What about salt? Are you careful with that?” Dr. Friedman continued. Yes, the patient replied; just then, his wife threw open a cabinet to reveal three big bags of potato chips.

“Here he told me he was careful with salt, and he’s got all these potato chips in there,” Friedman laughs. As a Medicare evaluator, Friedman goes house to house visiting patients, just like an old-fashioned doctor making house calls. In an age where managed care and computerized medicine are wresting control from doctors and shortening appointment times, Friedman has the luxury of seeing people in their homes—and making critical recommendations about their health.

“If doctors meet patients at home, they have the chance to see lots of things they’d never see at the office,” says Friedman. “I sit down with them for an hour and by the time we’re done, they’re showing me pictures of their family.”

Friedman ran a small practice for 34 years in Middleboro, Massachusetts, before joining a large group health plan last year. “It was not a good fit for me,” says Friedman, who found himself increasingly frustrated navigating new systems, which were inhibiting his ability to communicate well with his patients. “Using the computer system was like texting while doctoring,” he says.

“The daily frustration became so overwhelming that after three months I left.” He spent the next three months volunteering for a local hospice and putting in many hours on his bike. Then a corporate recruiter called, asking if he’d be interested in a job at CenseoHealth. The Texas-based company works with Medicare and supplemental private insurance companies to monitor elderly patients and provide preventative care that could avoid costly procedures later.

Now each morning he packs a lunch, shoulders his black leather doctor’s bag, and dons the white doctor’s coat he bought on Amazon.com. Then he’s off, seeing up to five patients a day—anywhere from Cape Cod to Central Massachusetts. He checks their height, weight, and blood pressure, goes over their medications, examines their homes for falling risks, and makes sure they’re up to date on mammograms and flu shots, all the while setting them at ease with his steady patter.

“I have a whole repertoire of jokes,” Friedman says, estimating that he’s made 500 house calls since September 2013. Growing up in Brookline, Massachusetts, he was used to seeing his father’s patients at the medical practice his father ran in their home. Now Friedman has developed his own bedside manner, talking quickly and peppering his conversation with anecdotes. There was the time he had to walk through Beacon Hill in 90-degree heat, dragging his scale; the man he met in a trailer park who ended up being an accomplished poet; the person on Cape Cod who filled his house with plane and ship models, including a huge replica of the Titanic.

Friedman says that while many of his house calls are routine, more than once they’ve been life saving. On one visit, for instance, he met a 97-year-old woman who played Beethoven on the piano for him. She then mentioned she was waking every morning at 3:00 with night sweats. Friedman discovered that her primary care physician had wrongly prescribed her diabetes medicine. “She
could’ve gone into a diabetic coma.”

If Friedman is successful, it’s because he gets to treat his patients as whole people rather than as collections of symptoms. “I never had an hour to spend with patients,” he says. “Now I feel like I get to know them really well.”

A journalist embarks on a voyage into the unknown.

I started studying French two years ago. I was 36, and it had dawned on me that there was something embarrassing about the fact that I was monolingual. Perhaps this was about class, as I had gone from my working-class Baltimore roots to the literary world of New York. Perhaps it was about New York itself, where in a 30-minute subway ride you can easily hear five different people speaking five different languages. Perhaps it was my wife, who’d fallen in love with Paris and demanded that I visit, sure that I would fall in love, too. Or perhaps it was just me, feeling a little too settled and looking for something radical to shake up the routine. I had no idea how radical the experience would actually be.

The thing about studying a foreign language is that it really is a foreign language, which is to say that it’s a dizzying array of words to be memorized, rules for how those words should be assembled, and customs for when those assembled words should be deployed. And those customs sometimes bend back on themselves—the polite form of a personal pronoun can be both self-deprecating and threatening. You have to recognize the context. This is the reason why I speak of the process of “studying” French and not the impossibility of “learning” it. I am a native English speaker and a writer. A large part of the joy of my vocation comes from understanding that it’s impossible to “learn” the English language, if only because the language refuses to sit still. I acknowledge that the French tend to be more conservative in this regard, but the point still stands due to the sheer size of the language.

What I quickly learned was that saying I am going to “study” French was like saying I am going to sail to China. The language is so vast that one can, all at once, feel both great progress being made and a great distance still to go. Sailing from California to Hawaii is far and difficult to achieve; getting to China is farther—and harder—still.

I faced this dynamic several times this summer while studying French at Middlebury. The College’s 11 Language Schools are the gold standard for those seeking to go beyond their mother tongues.
Middlebury insists that you not speak your native language for the entirety of your stay, communicating solely in the language that you are studying. For me this meant seven weeks of all French; no English.

The effect of this was to turn every single encounter, large or small, into a mental Pilates class. This is true, not simply because of the difficulty of the language, but because of what that difficulty does to the ego. The kind of students attracted to the language tended to be people who were educated and smart. And yet to learn French, most of us were reduced to the mental equivalent of three-year-olds. The result was a constant mental exercise, not simply in recalling the language, but embracing the fact that whatever we might say would almost certainly be wrong. The onslaught was forceful and unremitting—the most basic requests became an exercise in one’s capacity to endure humiliation.

And I think this was Middlebury’s greatest reward, and also the greatest reward in studying another language. Many of us were from worlds where we were constantly complimented on our intelligence. But acquiring a foreign language—at least as an adult—requires you to part with all of those compliments and the assumptions you make about yourself. That is the place where true learning can occur, in that uncomfortable spot where your “smartness” cannot save you. I came to Middlebury to continue to study French. But what quickly became clear was that I was, in fact, studying how to study.

A deadly virus sweeps uncontrolled across Africa, leaving thousands dead. The scenario is now bleakly familiar, but this particular Ebola outbreak—in 2006—wasn’t nightly on our television screens, nor did it galvanize the international community. Why? Because its victims weren’t humans, but gorillas.

The virus didn’t quite wipe out the western gorilla populations found in Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and both the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Congo. But diseases and poaching have left these animals in catastrophic decline, and the World Wildlife Fund has classed them as “critically endangered.” The question becomes: how to save them? Perhaps, says one expert, vaccinations are the answer.

The opinion isn’t popular, since conservationists have traditionally favored a more hands-off approach. However, Peter Walsh, lecturer in primate quantitative ecology at the University of Cambridge, is challenging the orthodoxy. “Some people in the primatology community hate me,” he says. “My criticisms are fairly blunt. But being popular is not my objective in life.”

Walsh knows about unconventionality. After graduating from Middlebury with a BA in history in 1982, he spent several years “bumming around.” He drifted to California, cutting lawns and working as a busboy and in a shoe store. He took community college classes in basic math and science and realized his aptitude in these disciplines. And after seeing a job posting for a field assistant on a project studying prairie dogs in South Dakota, he applied, got the job, and was hooked. Now he advocates using rigorous scientific reasoning to gain insights into animal populations.

His work has led him to some of the world’s most distinguished universities—he received his PhD at Yale, was a group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, and currently lectures at Cambridge—and to the depths of the African jungle.

Today, Walsh is sitting in his Cambridge office, readying himself for his next trip to the Republic of Congo. “Ten hours in a 4×4 just to get to the site,” he says. Huge photographs of gorillas decorate his walls. On his office bookcase, he has a pygmy crossbow, complete with a quiver of black-tipped arrows.

Walsh was among the first to identify the threat Ebola poses to the gorilla population (and, by extension, the threat it poses to the humans who live near the animals and hunt them for meat).Nature published his groundbreaking study, in which he identified Ebola as killing 5,000 gorillas. Now, eight years later, a new epidemic is causing havoc across West Africa.

At the time of this writing, the virus has killed 3,800 people in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Nigeria—with another 8,000 confirmed or highly likely cases. Walsh believes we need bold thinking to save both humans and gorillas. It’s time, he says, to concentrate on what’s effective right here, right now.

He says the hands-off, “Garden of Eden”-style approach to saving gorillas hasn’t worked. “They are in precipitous decline. But primatologists say we can’t disrupt the balance of nature, that vaccines are the agents of the devil. That the gorillas would be so stressed out by the process of daring that their immune systems would be suppressed, or they’d freak out and kill people.

“Well, I can tell you one result of our captive gorilla study: they did not freak out. To get that study off the ground, I wrote to hundreds of people explaining that vaccination was not dangerous. I had to make rigorous scientific arguments to counter irrational, hysterical, emotional ones.”

This first-ever trial of a measles vaccine in habituated gorillas took Walsh years to set up. Funded by Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft, the study is being prepared for publication.

He also recently coauthored a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that examines the first Ebola vaccine trial on captive chimpanzees held at the New Iberia Research Center in Louisiana. The study found the vaccine safe. But the National Institutes of Health, which runs the primate center, has decided to shut the center down, saying that chimpanzee research is now “largely unnecessary.”

Walsh, though, remains undaunted. He’s now looking to the private sector, which shares his willingness to take risks. Currently, he’s working with German philanthropist Sabine Plattner and prominent conservationist Magdalena Bermejo on a new project that uses telemetry to track western gorilla populations, which move far more quickly and further than their mountain gorilla cousins.

Now it takes up to five years to find a group of lowland gorillas and acclimate them to tolerating visitors. But if these populations, situated in the Republic of Congo, can be efficiently tracked and vaccinated against communicable human diseases, they can be habituated to tourists much more rapidly. Responsible tourism—run by businesses but advised by conservationists—will help locals find live gorillas more valuable than dead ones. And it’s this kind of project, Walsh says, that will save these animals.

But he believes the conservation establishment needs to wake up if gorillas are to survive beyond the 21st century. “Conservation has this learned-helplessness thing,” he says. “This is the way it’s always been. You’re not going to be able to change things. You can’t do that. I understand Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs now—and their thinking that if you want to do something, you should just go ahead and do it, shut your ears, and be willing to fail. Eventually, you’ll succeed.”

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/10/30/a-planet-without-apes/feed/0Animal Taleshttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/10/30/animal-tales/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/10/30/animal-tales/#commentsThu, 30 Oct 2014 14:54:40 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14071Here are a few things to know about Antonia Losano and her relationship with animals. She loves dogs, cats, and otters. She’s terrified of horses and mice. She thinks bats are creepy. She says that the fox couple that lives near her house are adorable, but admits to mixed feelings when one morning she saw the two trotting through her yard with a freshly killed rabbit dangling from one of the fox’s jaws. ¶ And she loves to tell you that animals are “everywhere, not just outside.” They are a part of our language (“he’s a fox,” “what a cute chick”); they’re part of our social identity (the geopolitical “Russian Bear”); and above all they are a part of our literature. Losano, an associate professor of English and American literatures, teaches a course called Animals in Literature, and here she offers a few of her favorite animal literary references. (With an assist from her husband, Dan Brayton, also an associate professor of English and American literatures, who gives us his take on the Whale in Moby-Dick.)

The white rabbit from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass“ ‘Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it’s getting!’ ”
He’s so very un-rabbit like. We think of rabbits as fuzzy and cozy and cuddly, and he’s absolutely not. The White Rabbit signals to us that not all is normal in Alice’s brain.

Mr. and Mrs. Mallard the ducks from Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings“When they reached the pond and swam across to the little island, there was Mr. Mallard waiting for them, just as he had promised.”
I study romance and courtship plots, and I’m continually struck by how often literature, especially children’s literature, relies on birds—ducks, turtledoves—to serve as stand-ins for monogamous love. There seems to be a desperate desire to say: “Look at those ducks, Mr. and Mrs. Mallard, raising their children. Aren’t they an iconic heterosexual couple, married with children, devoted to each other and family?” It’s as if we need these examples—pictures of marital bliss—to say “it’s normal to mate for life.”

Mr. Fox, the fox from Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox“ ‘I therefore invite you all,’ Mr. Fox went on, ‘to stay here with me for ever.’ ”
Traditionally, we think of foxes as sly and clever, a depiction that dates back to the Middle Ages with the fable Chanticleer and the Fox. (Chaucer memorably captured this same tale in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Barbara Cooney has also used it in her 20th-century children’s book, Chanticleer and the Fox.) But Dahl’s fox is a bit different. Dahl managed to preserve all of the fox’s slyness while also making him lovable. Dahl’s fox, at his core, is a patriarch who cares for his family and friends; his slyness is in service to the greater good.

Napoleon the pig from George Orwell’s Animal Farm“ ‘Four legs good, two legs better! All Animals Are Equal. But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others.’ ”
The word “pig” has undeniably negative connotations, and Napoleon is a particularly piggish, a pig. Yet he is a pig who, by the novel’s end, is indistinguishable from humans. For a while, you can fool yourself that he’s just a pig, but the moral of Orwell’s allegory is that there’s something inherently destructive in the human search for power. We may be tempted to say that power is “dehumanizing,” but Orwell suggests otherwise.

The bear from William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale“Exit, pursued by a bear.”
What’s great is that the bear is famous for not really being there. It’s fleeting. present just in this one moment, this one stage direction. Scholars have argued over whether a real bear performed the role, as there were performing bears during this time, or whether a man in a bear costume played it. Bears have an iconic status as an animal that could surprise you in the woods—they’re large, they can be frightening—so to be pursued by a bear would be a classic nightmare. Yet Shakespeare turns the nightmare into something almost comic.

The wolf from Angela Carter’s short story “The Company of Wolves.”“The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat. She laughed at him full in the face, ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing.”
Wolves are a fantasy of the familiar made strange; they’re like dogs, but they’re not dogs. Perhaps this is why they make such good heroes in supernatural romance fiction; part of our erotic makeup desires something as familiar as a domestic pet, but wild like a wolf. Angela Carter retells the “Little Red Riding Hood” fairy tale, but here Red, isn’t frightened by the wolf with his big eyes and his big teeth. Instead of running away, she throws off her clothes and begins to undress him.

The cockroach from Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis“He was a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone.”
Part of what Kafka is saying is in our present corporate culture we’re all bugs anyway. Gregor is a company man, a traveling salesman, who is a slave to routine, rising at the same time every day, catching the same train, following the same patterns. When he wakes up as a cockroach, he doesn’t particularly notice. He’s concerned that he can’t get out of bed, but the fact that he’s s a bug is less important than the fact that he’ll miss his train to work.

The whale from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
“So utterly lost was Flask [the third mate of the Pequod] to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of their majestic bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension of any possible danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion, the wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water-rat, requiring only a little circumvention and some small application of time and trouble in order to kill and boil.”
The White Whale in Moby-Dick symbolizes our desperate quest to conquer what we don’t know; in the course of the novel it also comes to symbolize how little we do know—about whales, the ocean, the biophysical environment, and ourselves. Melville was a profoundly liberal thinker (small “l”) whose narrative of a lost-soul mariner (Ishmael), a monomaniacal whaling captain (Ahab), and a noble savage harpooneer (Queequeg) is in fact a relentlessly critical scrutiny of the limitations of our systems of knowledge. In the story, whales begin as fearsome beasts and evolve into emblems of what we don’t know about ourselves—they become us, our humanity.

Buck the dog from Jack London’s The Call of the Wild“And each time the joyful bark that trembled in Buck’s throat was twisted into a savage growl.”
In the first part of the novel, Buck is a complacent domestic tyrant. He’s king of the castle, but has done nothing to earn that position. When he’s stolen and shipped off to the Yukon and forced to become part of a sled pack team, Buck must do something that domestic dogs don’t typically have to do—test his mettle in the “real world.” First he has to fight for survival in the harsh winter; then he has to fight to become alpha male in the pack. It’s a brutal and violent stage of his life (and of the book). Then he meets Thornton, a man who can inspire loyalty, and the tale becomes a human/animal love story. Yet when Thornton dies, Buck reverts to the wild, literally running with the wolves. In this one character, we see all the possible options that a dog can be.

The geese from the Mary Oliver poem “Wild Geese.”“Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air / are heading home again.”
Oliver offers us an exquisite image of wildness, mystery, and the inevitable cycles of life. Geese are harbingers of spring and fall. Here in Middlebury, it’s a part of our annual ritual. The geese have left; snow is coming. For Oliver, geese mean that and much more: they are “harsh and exciting—/over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”

Black Beauty the horse from Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty“Why don’t they cut their own children’s ears into points to make them look sharp?”
When Sewell wrote Black Beauty, people had radically different relationships to horses than they do today. In 19th-century London, horses were more populous than people. Horses were work animals, They were the primary method of transportation. Everyone was intimately acquainted with horses then, and this book captures those lives. Today, horses are very expensive pets.

Aesop’s Fables
I can’t pick just one to illustrate the significance of these fables—it’s the very collection that’s so revealing. Why do we have these moral fables, really the first children’s tales that teach us how to be good—and almost all the characters are all animals? Why can’t we teach our children how to behave by telling stories about humans? I think it’s because we need the animals to provide distance from ourselves. And it works. Psychologists have conducted research that shows children do learn morals from
animal stories. From animal tales.

Being a veterinary surgeon in a 24-hour animal hospital means each day’s cases are unlike the last.

All that’s visible above the blue surgical drapes is the dog’s lower jaw, tilted up as she lies anesthetized on her back. Her mouth is open, her black fur and whiskers sheared to the skin, and her cuspid teeth, under the lights, appear to glow. She’ll soon lose those teeth. Her name is Stella*, an eight-year-old Labrador who went in for a dental checkup several weeks prior and came out with a diagnosis of cancer: a soft-tissue sarcoma, jelly-bean sized and nestled between her lower lip and gum. The doctors cut it out once, but it returned. Removing it for good means taking about two inches off her jaw.

In the next room, veterinary surgeon Dana King ’89 puts on a cap and mask, opens a package of surgical soap, and scrubs up at the sink. Then she steps into the operating room, where two technicians are at Stella’s bedside, monitoring her vital signs and her anesthesia, and unrolling packs of sterile instruments on the tray to the side. An iPod plays Paul Simon. And outside the window, midafternoon traffic hums along the highway. “How’s she doing?” King asks. And more softly, looking down at her patient: “All right, Stella. Here we go.”

Stella’s surgery is the last order of the day for King, one of two surgeons at Veterinary Emergency Service, a 24-hour clinic and specialized-care facility (which also employs an internist, cardiologist, and oncologist) in Middleton, Wisconsin, just outside Madison. Mostly the clinic serves dogs and cats, although it also sees some rabbits and, occasionally, birds or other exotics. This morning, a Wednesday in early September, King arrived just before 9:00 to make the rounds, checking on the patients who’d stayed overnight in the hospital. There’s Clyde, a retriever from West Texas, with a mysteriously swollen back paw. Probably a puncture wound that got infected—he’s in Wisconsin training to be a competitive field-trial dog and spends his days running through woods and weeds—but so far King hasn’t found the pathogen. Tests for fungal infections came back negative, and a bacteria culture grew only “garden-variety skin bugs,” she says. A biopsy ruled out cancer. She may never determine what happened. Which is OK, she says, as long as Clyde keeps getting better.

Then there’s Lily, a six-month-old Bernese mountain dog who ate part of a couch the day before and came to the ER with a stomach full of wool batting. Her owners tried an emetic to help her body rid itself of the batting, but she still required surgery to remove what was left. “Apparently she’s eaten socks before, and other stuff, so she’s probably going to be a frequent flyer here,” King says. She bends down and takes Lily’s face into both hands; the dog’s tail wags, thumping against the side of the cage. “Hi! You’re very sweet,” King tells her. “Yes, you are. Looks like you’re feeling good today.” Along with tumors and orthopedic problems, “foreign-body removals”—opening up an animal to take out something it shouldn’t have eaten—is one of the most common surgeries King performs. Cats tend to ingest ribbons, coins, sewing needles, and thread. Dogs eat socks, underwear, fishhooks, wooden skewers, and—well—just about anything. King once pulled a rubber duck from a dog’s stomach. “You could see it in the x-ray,” she says. Its bright silhouette was outlined against the animal’s dark belly.

Last in King’s rounds: Megan, a black-and-white Shih Tzu who the day before had abdominal surgery to remove two tumors. King is a little worried about her. The vet took out half the dog’s small intestine and biopsied some nodules on her liver. Eighteen hours later, Megan’s still curled on her blanket and uninterested in food. A feeding tube gives her constant liquid infusion, and an IV catheter delivers pain medicine. King talks with one of the overnight vet techs about how Abby’s doing: no appetite, but a few hours ago, she went outside and walked, and this morning she had been sleeping soundly until they shifted her to measure her heart rate and temperature.

King opens the cage door. “Hi sweetheart,” she says, touching the dog’s incisions. “Are you going to try to bite me?” Megan doesn’t. She lifts her face weakly and whimpers for attention. “Hi,” King answers, almost whispering, stroking the dog’s head. “How are you?”

Being a veterinary surgeon is the only job King ever really considered. She grew up on Long Island, in a house full of pets: cats and dogs, mice, rats, gerbils, a rabbit, and a hamster. When she was five or six, she and her brother set up a maze for the hamster and somewhere along the way as he ran it, a block fell on his head. The family took him to a veterinarian. “So it was a hamster with head trauma,” King says, suppressing a chuckle over what now seems to her an absurdly futile vet visit. “They talked to me with a straight face, but I’m sure behind the scenes, they were saying, ‘There’s not much we can do.’”

Nor was there. The hamster didn’t survive, but King’s path was set. “My parents said that from then on, that’s what I talked about.”

Another important influence came when King was 13 years old, and her grandmother passed away, leaving her some money, which King used to buy a horse. On Long Island, where she was surrounded by horse farms and racetracks and equestrian schools, getting a horse seemed like a natural thing to do. After only a few months, the horse died suddenly—after breaking its knee running in a field, he had to be put down—and so a short time later, King got another horse, a beautiful chestnut named Justin. He was an ex-racehorse, three years old, silly and sweet—the same color as Secretariat, with none of Secretariat’s talent. “He was a disaster at being a racehorse and wonderful at being a trail horse,” she says. When she came to Middlebury, she brought Justin with her. After classes, she’d get on her bike and ride six miles out to the farm where Justin was boarded. She’d saddle him up, and they’d go out on trails.

After Middlebury, King went to veterinary school at Cornell and then followed her schooling with an internship at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Justin came along, too. Then in 1996, she got a residency at the University of Pennsylvania. By then, Justin was an old man, and King knew she’d be too busy to spend much time with him. He was happy in Ontario, so she decided to let him stay. “He was just retired out in a field in Ontario for the last couple years of his life,” she says. “In grass up to his knees.” When Justin died from intestinal cancer, he was 26 years old.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/10/30/paging-doctor-king/feed/0Timeline: Town & Gownhttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/10/30/timeline-town-gown/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/10/30/timeline-town-gown/#commentsThu, 30 Oct 2014 14:54:09 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14096During the past decade, Middlebury College has engaged with the local community on a number of landmark initiatives:

2004
The College and the town renegotiate a “payment in lieu of taxes” (PILOT) agreement in which the College will make an annual contribution to the town, the sum of which is tied to the performance of Middlebury’s endowment. (In 2013, this payment was $251,617.) Middlebury annually pays around $690,000 in taxes on property being used for purposes not directly tied to the mission of educating students.

2007
The College pledges $1 million to complete the renovation of the Town Hall Theater (THT), an ambitious community effort to renovate and restore a 19th-century building—which once housed the town hall and later an opera house—in the heart of Middlebury. The $1 million pledge, on top of an earlier $250,000 gift, capped off the $5 million project. With this partnership, Middlebury students are afforded the opportunity to work with community members on theater productions, while THT also commits to working College productions—including summer Language School performances and a winter term production—into its seasonal lineup.

2007
The College pledges $9 million to help fund the construction of a new in-town bridge, which will provide a second major crossing of Otter Creek. Designed to ease traffic congestion and provide an additional route for emergency vehicles, the new bridge carries a cost of $16 million; with the College’s contribution, the project is fast-tracked, ending more than 50 years of stalled efforts to construct a second in-town crossing. The bridge opened in 2010.

2013
The town and the College reach an agreement to jointly fund the construction of a new town hall and town recreation facility, with the College contributing $5.5 million toward the $7.5 million project. In addition to the new construction, the College and the town agree to swap land parcels. The new town office will be built adjacent to the Ilsley Library on land once owned by the College. The College will acquire town land at the intersection of Main and College Streets, turning this area into a triangular public park and green space. The town of Middlebury voted to approve this proposal in 2014.

2013
The College and town finalize a project in which the College acquires and conveys to the town an empty building on Main Street, which will be razed and turned into pedestrian access to the town’s Marble Works commercial district.

2014
The College conveys to the town more than an acre of riverfront property behind the Ilsley Library, which the town will join with its own land holdings to develop future retail, commercial, and residential projects.

2014
The College renegotiates its PILOT with Ripton, agreeing to a 10-year deal to pay the municipality $157,000 annually in recognition of the nontaxable property the institution owns there. In addition, Ripton schoolchildren are to be provided free ski lessons at the Snow Bowl and Rikert Nordic Center.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/10/30/timeline-town-gown/feed/0Cover Essay: What’s on His Mind?http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/10/30/cover-essay-whats-on-his-mind/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/10/30/cover-essay-whats-on-his-mind/#commentsThu, 30 Oct 2014 14:53:45 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14100For many years, my parents had a rough-coated Jack Russell terrier, a breed of dog known to be tough, tenacious, very smart, and extremely moody. (About the only quality he shared with Harlow, our cover dog and model on this page, was his smarts. Harlow is chill and very sweet; and very sweet; Woody, most definitely, was not.)

In his later years, as Woody’s energy began to wane, it seemed that his mental acuity—which would occasion behavior best described as devious—increased. Jack Russells are an active breed; when Woody’s stamina started to slide, his mind took over. Or so it appeared.

When my sister was getting married, my parents threw a cookout for out-of-town guests; my family being from the South, barbecue was the featured fare. It was a casual gathering, paper plates on laps enjoyed outside in the mid-spring weather. Of course, paper plates on laps subsequently became paper plates on the ground. And this is where Woody comes into the story. At one point that night, I witnessed Woody trot by with a half-eaten barbecue sandwich in his mouth. I chalked it up to him having received a right generous snack from one of our guests—until a few minutes later when I saw him trot past with another sandwich. I followed him this time, watching him scamper under a bush, only to emerge moments later with no sandwich. After he had trotted off again, I looked under the bush and discovered a pile of sandwiches, in various states of being consumed. Woody had been pilfering sandwiches off the plates of unsuspecting folks and . . . was saving them for later? Are dogs capable of planning ahead?

I hadn’t thought much about this particular episode until I found myself sitting in on Jason Arndt’s first-year seminar on animal cognition. On the morning of my visit, the class was discussing mental time travel. The question being examined: “When animals plan, are they imagining the future?” I was barely sitting down before I was wondering, Was Woody imagining himself in the future chowing down on those sandwiches?

While my thoughts were on Woody, the attention of the class—eight women and five men, plus their instructor, arrayed around a long table—was focused on a chimpanzee that lived in a zoo in Sweden. On the days when the zoo was to be opened, this fellow would gather rocks, store them in specific, strategically located piles, and then, hours later, hurl them at gawking visitors.

“I don’t know how strong of an argument this is, but he had to have thought this through,” one student said. But does planning ahead equate to mental time travel? Arndt wondered. Is the chimp thinking, as he’s gathering rocks, I’ll show them! “As far as I know,” he added, “chimps don’t cache things in nature.”

The consensus was that yes, this chimp was picturing himself throwing those stones as he gathered them. (“He’s thinking, I’m so pumped.”) The scientific community seems split on the subject of
mental time travel in animals. But I know where I land. I’m convinced that Woody was thinking, on that spring evening, I’m so pumped.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/10/30/cover-essay-whats-on-his-mind/feed/2Regarding Stameshkinhttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/10/30/regarding-stameshkin/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2014/10/30/regarding-stameshkin/#commentsThu, 30 Oct 2014 14:53:30 +0000http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14105Around Middlebury, the name Stameshkin is more of a proper noun. As in, “Check Stameshkin,” or, “Here’s what I found in Stameshkin.”

David Stameshkin is the author of The Town’s College: Middlebury College, 1800-1915 and The Strength of the Hills, 1915-1990, a two-volume set that serves as our official history. Many, though, no longer link the name to an actual person and instead simply affix the moniker to disembodied authority. So on an otherwise languorous summer afternoon, I had a hard time reconciling this accepted definition of “Stameshkin” with the bushy-haired, mustachioed, spectacled fellow who had just popped into my office and good-naturedly introduced himself as David Stameshkin. My confusion only deepened when he proffered his latest book: not the long-awaited (in some quarters) third volume of Stameshkin—see!—but a slender paperback whose title immediately signaled a twist on the now-familiar conceit of people listing all the activities they wish to do before shuffling off their mortal coils. Playfully tweaking the form—even after strategically inserting asterisks, we’ve chosen to leave the actual words to your imagination—and announcing “things I will not be doing before I die,” David Stameshkin’s new book left me briefly speechless. But not for long.

Since reading this riotously funny, yet also poignant and reflective book, I’ve been recommending it to friends, colleagues—even strangers. It’s refreshing how Stameshkin (the man) has prompted me to think about what I wish to accomplish in ways that the myriad and plentiful “bucket lists” never have.

Before leaving my office, the author told me he still wants to write one more historical monograph before he kicks the…you know. It won’t be volume three, he said, but it will be Middlebury-centric: a biography of Joseph Battell, one of the more pivotal characters in this institution’s history. Not to knock the 19th-century benefactor or what will surely be an insightful account of his life, but doesn’t this news make what Stameshkin doesn’t plan on doing with the rest of his years more enticing?

In search of Vermont’s most mysterious creature

I tumbled headlong down the hillside once, twice, three times before landing in a heap of snow beside Ky Koitzsch, a wildlife biologist from in Waitsfield, Vermont and also my guide as we trekked along a remote ridgeline in the Green Mountains, east of Granville, Vermont, in search of moose.

“The avalanche method,” I explained, as I struggled to extract my splayed cross-country skis from nearly three feet of powder. “It works almost as well as skiing when the hill is this steep.”

After untangling my limbs, I reattached my skis. Ky waited all of five seconds before setting out again along the moose tracks, not noticing the difficulty with which I was clambering after him. He had eyes only for the hoof prints that curved out before us, disappearing into a dense thicket of decapitated firs.

“Tracks!” called Ky from twenty yards ahead. “Here are our first moose tracks.” He pointed into the snow with his pole. “They’re not fresh—probably two days old or so, judging by the amount of snow that’s blown into them.” The tracks were widely spaced and diagonally staggered.

He then skied a few yards and, leaning over, put his head a few inches from an indentation in the snow.

“Here’s a good one!” He drew me to his side with an animated hand gesture. “You see how this side is deeper?” He didn’t give me a chance to respond. “You can tell the direction the moose is traveling based on the uneven depth of the print. When the moose walks, it puts most of its weight on the front of its hoof, just like we do. So the deeper side of the print with point in the direction the animal is moving.”

He rolled his balled fist through the snow, mimicking the movement of a moose on the hoof. “We’ll follow these for now. They should lead us to some fresher tracks.”

Our trek took us still higher into the Green Mountains and further from the national park access road that had deposited us into these snowy woods. Ky was confident that we’d find fresher tracks before the day was out—if not an actual moose.

“Come look at this, Conor,” Ky said without looking up from the trunk he was scrutinizing. “This is a great example of bark stripping. You can see marks from the moose’s teeth. Moose only have bottom incisors, so the scraping will always be angled upwards.”

I ran my hand along the grooved surface, thankful for the momentary respite from our energetic jaunt.

Other than tracks, trees display the most prominent signs of moose. During the winter months, moose in the Vermont woods rely on woody twigs for food, and evidence of moose munching on trees could be seen almost everywhere Ky and I turned. The tree Ky pointed to was a striped maple, one of the many varieties that moose will eat during the winter.

“The food moose eat in the summer is buried now,” Ky said. “Now, instead of greens like leaves and aquatic vegetation, the moose will browse on mostly woody twigs and bark. Around here, I find that during the winter, they eat mostly striped maple, balsam fir, hobblebush, and occasionally cherry and birch.”

Moose derives from the Algonquin word “moz”—meaning “twig eater.” And moose certainly live up to their name. The animals consume staggering amounts of vegetation. A typical moose will eat sixty pounds of vegetation in a day. All of which is digested in a moose’s massive, four-chambered stomach.

We stopped in a meadow about thirty yards away from a striped maple tree that a hungry moose had stripped of its bark.

“These,” he said, gesturing to the meadow of firs surrounding us, “have been chowed! Notice that none of these firs are more than five feet tall—moose stunt their growth by coming back and eating here for multiple years.”

“Do you think they’re fresh?” I asked.

He ripped a branch off the closest fir tree. “Look at this,” he said, handing me the branch.

I glanced at it, then back at him. I could tell the end had been chewed off, but didn’t know what else I was looking for.

“Notice the color of the bark,” he told me. “You can tell from the brown color of the inner wood that this moose passed through at least two days ago. If this bite had been taken any more recently, the inner wood would still be yellow or even green.”

We moved through several meadows that had been trampled by browsing moose. Ky followed one pair of tracks for a little bit before picking up a new one—and then a newer one.

“Ah, here we go. Check this out. You can tell this is a moose rub based on the height.”

I studied the patch of trunk he was discussing. Starting at about three feet off the ground (and then spanning another four or so feet) the tree’s bark had been rubbed away, leaving stringy bits of wood hanging at the top and bottom edges.

“This bark wasn’t eaten, it was rubbed off by the moose’s antlers. You could tell that the bark on that striped maple we saw before had been eaten because of the incisor grooves and the clean edges,” Ky said. “But you can tell this fir was rubbed because there are no incisor grooves.”

He removed a glove, running his bare hand along the trunk. “See?” he said. “Totally smooth. Also, the edges of the bark are stringy and frayed when antlers rub them.”

“Keep your eye out,” he said.

As fast as we were moving, Ky reminded me that we couldn’t hope to match the speed of a moose travelling through the woods. I found it hard to imagine animals as large as moose moving swiftly through the labyrinth of brambles and fallen trees that were clawing us from all angles.

“Look at this!” Ky said, “This is great! A fresh moose bed—it can’t be much more than a few hours old!”

We stood before a rounded depression in the snow—a bowl a moose’s body had created. At its center was a heap of what looked like tiny chocolate eggs. A few inches beyond, it appeared someone had spilled a dozen highlighter markers. I couldn’t take my eyes off the fluorescent urine and the pile of droppings.

“Pick one up,” Ky said. “We’ll see how long ago the moose was here.”

I picked up a small piece of scat. It was an egg-shaped pellet, not much bigger than a marble.

“Is it warm?”

“No,” I said, squeezing the pellet. “It’s not frozen though.”

Ky picked up another pellet from the heap, rolling it between his fingers. It broke open like an Easter egg.

“Sawdust.” Ky showed me the digested bits of wood. “That’s really all it is. Now if we were looking at coyote scat—or any other carnivore, for that matter—it might have been uglier. This is basically just cellulose.”

We started following these new tracks, which Ky estimated were made about an hour earlier.

“I’ll bet she heard us,” he whispered. “We can’t be far behind her now. As we ski, try to be as quiet as you can.”

We spent ten minutes in vigorous pursuit. The tracks reached an open meadow and pivoted sharply, turning uphill. Then they turned back downhill. Or were they a different set of tracks? I slowed down, unsure.

“It looks like she went higher up into the mountains,” Ky said, pausing. “I’m thinking we should probably head back. We’ve had this cow moving pretty fast for awhile now, and she’ll already be pretty warm in weather like this. We really ought to let her be. She’s probably struggling as it is.”

“Of course,” I said, trying not to sound disappointed.

This essay is an abridged version of a longer story and video produced for the winter term course Writing the Adventure.